The Athletics are in agreement with first baseman Joey Meneses on a minor league contract, reports Francys Romero. The MAS+ client spent this past season in Triple-A in the Mets organization.
Meneses is coming off a .265/.322/.447 line with 11 homers at the top minor league level. He put the ball in play but didn’t walk much and posted average batted ball marks. That wasn’t going to be enough to force his way onto the MLB roster behind Pete Alonso and Mark Vientos. He’ll have a similarly uphill path to a big league job with the A’s. They have Nick Kurtz and Brent Rooker locked into first base and designated hitter, respectively.
The 33-year-old Meneses is likely to head to Triple-A Las Vegas. He’s a career .282/.338/.480 hitter over parts of five Triple-A seasons. Meneses played in the big leagues with the Nationals between 2022-24. He had a huge showing out of nowhere as a 30-year-old rookie, hitting .324 with 13 homers in his first 56 big league contests.
A rebuilding Washington team gave him a full year as a starting first baseman to see if they’d stumbled on a late-career breakout. That didn’t prove to be the case, as Meneses hit .261/.311/.370 in nearly 1000 trips to the plate in 2023-24. The Nationals dropped him from the roster at the beginning of last offseason.
I’ll always wonder why Meneses gets multiple chances after his 2022 season but Frank Schwindel was cut halfway thru 2023 and never got a phone call ever again
Makes one appreciate Michael Busch after Frank the Tank and never-nervous Matt Mervis.
Schwindel’s first proper season in the majors (2021) was comparable to Meneses’ first proper season (2022).
The problem for Schwindel was his second season was a complete faceplant. He went from 1.7 bWAR and a 156 OPS+ to a -1.1 bWAR and 76 OPS+. After that, he went to Japan and couldn’t even hack it at the upper levels there. then it was on to Mexico. He was a one hit wonder who flamed out quickly.
Meneses followed his first season of 1.1 bWAR and 164 OPS+ with a second season over 650 PA with a 0.6 bWAR and 100 OPS+. A big step back, for sure, but still showed enough for another shot as he still looked like he could be serviceable. Year three was his down year and his fourth was entirely in the minors. This year could well be his last shot, but he got extra time because he was better, relatively speaking, over a longer period.
I’d guess he would be in Vegas in case an injury happens or something at the big level…